[NSFW Review] Interspecies Reviewers

Technologically undeveloped societies will have strong gender roles because (a) physical strength is important for doing many things, such as hard work or defending yourself from interpersonal violence, and men are stronger than women on average, and (b) if most children die young, the society survives only if women spend a lot of time being pregnant and taking care of babies, which puts a limit on which activities they can specialize in.

Therefore, we should expect developed societies to have weaker gender roles, on average, simply because they have the option to do so. Even in absence of pressure to weaken the gender roles, at least the pressure to strengthen them is absent. They are free to optimize for things that conflict with gender roles, such as having more people at work. -- Also, non-pregnant women are objectively more similar to men than pregnant women, and the women in developed countries spend more time being non-pregnant.

Some reasons for gender roles remain even in the developed societies, namely:

• it may be a stable equilibrium, e.g. if the society punishes any man or woman who deviates from the gender roles (or even argues against the gender roles), the roles may persist for a long time;
• women are actually not identical to men, and most of them still get pregnant at least sometimes, which has some impact e.g. on their careers;
• following the gender roles can make you more attractive in eyes of potential partners, i.e. the gender role is no longer a necessity, but a signal.

This alone does not explain why some societies -- developed, but oppressive -- actively promote strong gender roles. In theory, you could have a society that completely ignores gender, but is e.g. a totalitarian bureaucracy with extreme differences in wealth and power depending on your position in the bureaucracy, but uncorrelated with gender. Why do we see the macho dictatorships rather than this?

One guess is that we are not developed enough to completely overcome the need for physical strength; especially in dictatorships which probably need more soldiers and policemen than liberal societies. Guns make a difference, but they are not perfectly reliable (you may miss, you may get surprised, the opponent may keep fighting for a while despite being shot), you still want the gun + physical strength. Dictatorships of the future may fill the streets with battle drones that would automatically kill any subject in conflict with a cop, and this can make the physical strength finally irrelevant; the cops will simply observe whether the subjects follow the rules, and kill any troublemaker by pointing a finger at them.

Or maybe it is about psychology, that we still instinctively perceive men as more threatening, regardless of who has the gun, so the dictatorships prefer to employ men as soldiers and policemen, because image matters.

Another guess is that even in the hypothetical totalitarian bureaucracy with zero physical conflict, people would make coalitions that compete for power, and gender is simply a Schelling point to organize the coalitions around. Where your gender (whether male or female) has a majority, it is convenient to promote sexism, because it automatically puts you on the stronger side. Unless you have something better to organize around; which you sometimes do, and sometimes don't.

Femininism is intimately connected to sexual liberation.

I think there is a motte and bailey of feminism; officially all feminists oppose gender roles, but in practice some of them seem to want to replace them with different gender roles. Women are encouraged to express their sexuality more freely, but the same does not necessarily apply to men. The overall effect is mixed; it seems to be "more sex talk, less actual sex". (Correlation does not imply causation though; maybe people have less sex simply because they spend most of their free time scrolling Facebook on smartphones.) Sometimes you get more nudity; sometimes the Playboy magazine decides that actually nudity is problematic and there should be less of it.

I agree that weakening of gender roles leads to sexual liberation. The role of feminism seems a bit more complicated; in most cases, breaking a sexual taboo feels like a weapon against patriarchy, but if the "cishet while males" seem to enjoy some change too much, it creates a little cognitive dissonance.

Also, is Japan some avantgarde of feminism? Why isn't more ecchi anime produced in Sweden? :P

I wonder what abundant sex would buy us on top of that.

Spoilered because killjoy perspective:

The world of Ishuzoku Reviewers is a fun utopia I would actually want to live in. There are no villains in Ishuzoku Reviewers. Instead, the conflict comes from diversity. Different demi-human species have different preferences and different priorities. The dishomogeneity fuels friction, misunderstanding and arbitrage. But never hatred.

This is what coherent extrapolated volition looks like.

How ironic, if at all, is that final statement?

What comes to mind is that that sounds like tossing out a lot of what people care about today, and so my gut reaction here is leery. Even though today people's more conflictual values are shaped by the resource constraints in our environment, those values might ultimately survive reflection in some post-instrumental form [LW · GW], the way that many of our other human values have. Is that world impoverished, value-wise, in the way the

is?

typo: "Gugguk" should be "Gigguk"